


Redemption is a Rocky Road

by CelestialHeavens1



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Redemption, Unintentional Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 16:03:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15076718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialHeavens1/pseuds/CelestialHeavens1
Summary: Zod has a change of heart after 9x14 Conspiracy that changes everything else.





	Redemption is a Rocky Road

The fact that he hadn't told Kal-El about his new found abilities didn't mean that he didn't trust the boy, Zod told himself. He didn't want the boy to see him as an enemy anymore and Kal-El had finally stopped seeing him that way.

At first, Zod didn't understand what made Kal-El care for the humans the way he did. They seemed so pathetic, these cockroaches.

But then he started watching them as he walked through Metropolis. There were lovers who looked at each other the way he had his wife. He saw children playing and laughing who reminded him of his son. He saw friends together, looking as comfortable as he had once been with Jor-El. It made him pause.

Kal-El had found something worth saving in these humans. The boy had also found something worth saving in Zod, when he'd healed him.

Before he had died, Jor-El had seen something worth saving in him too. The boy was his father's son.

The first time Zod saved a human, it was a young woman with the coloring of his dead wife's. She was being held at gunpoint and was terrified, just shielding her son from the man who was threatening them. Zod accidentally broke the man's neck when he threw him back. He felt little remorse for it. How could he when the creature he killed was so depraved as to threaten a child or a woman selfless enough to give herself to protect another? He didn't leave a mark the way Kal-El did, didn't flaunt his Kryptonian heritage. A part of him wondered if he didn't want anyone knowing what he had done.

The next person he saved was a young man who was running one of those all night stores. He didn't kill the robbers, instead opting to drop them tied up with the footage on the police's doorstep.

It became an addiction after that, a rush. Every life he saved, it felt like he was in the middle of a battle again. He couldn't stop it. He couldn't help but help these flawed, broken creatures.

He started watching them. Some of them really tried to be more than what they had been born to. They had this amazing capacity to forgive those who had wronged them. The good outweighted the bad.

He started to see what Kal-El saw in them and why he fought so hard to protect them. There was something endearing about them, something worth protecting. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them.

He saw more than a few who reminded him of Jor-El, who reminded of their friendship. He went to the man's grave and swore on the spirit of his dead family that he would protect Jor-El's son no matter what.


End file.
